The Dying & The Dead 1: Post Apocalyptic Survival (24 page)

24

Heather

The
last eight hours had drained her. As she walked the pathway across the
wilderness she didn’t pass a single person, and by the time she saw the chain
link fence she didn’t care enough to hide. She stood in the open and looked at
the compound in front of her. A fence ran around a rectangle area half the size
of a football pitch. There were various stone buildings scattered within it,
and at the end, taller and wider than everything else, was a warehouse building
with a jagged roof and a smokeless chimney that stretched forty feet into the
sky.

This
had been an industrial complex once. She couldn’t imagine how the workers must
have felt having to see a structure like this every day. She thought about
middle-aged men and women trudging towards the gates, plastic bags full of
lunch swinging from their hands, already counting down the minutes despite
facing the beginning of a twelve hour shift. She could almost the feel their
desperation as every day they faced the grim reminder that this was their life,
that they would meet these gates every day until they died.

People
were worth more than this. They were better than just fleshy resources to be
shuffled around according to the whims of management obsessed with targets and
money. Before the outbreak, tens or even hundreds of years before it, people
had lost sight of what life was about. She didn’t think badly of the people
doing the jobs. They were honourable people giving up their most precious
resource, the seconds and minutes that made up their lifetimes, to keep food on
their family’s table. The outbreak had redressed the balance, but it had also
brought something much worse.

As Heather
approached the fence she scanned every part of the complex, but there was no
sign of any guards. In front of her there was a gate that was double her size.
A sign swung on the front with a red cross on it, and a padlock and chain
locked it in place.

Was
this their big defence?
She gripped the Heckler in her hand and thought about
blasting the padlock off. Deciding that would attract too much attention, she
raised her pistol and brought the handle down on the metal. After five attempts
the rusted steel split and fell to the floor, and Heather walked into the
complex.

The
yard was covered in black tarmac. The chain-link fence was grey and so were the
buildings, making the place cold to look at. She still couldn’t see any sign of
Capita soldiers.

From
somewhere, a familiar groaning sound drifted toward her. Ahead of her, in the
middle of the courtyard, was a porta cabin with a door on the front and a wall
lined with windows which had been boarded up.

She
walked into the courtyard and the groaning sound grew louder. She heard the
rattling of metal, and when she looked to her left she gasped. There was a pen,
surrounded by a fence, and in it were more than a dozen infected. Two of them
had seen her and they gripped the metal and shook it as though they could tear
it open. They gnashed their teeth and cried out as they tried to reach her, and
Heather wondered how strong the chain link was. There were men, women and
children infected, all with lifeless eyes and starving faces. Some were naked,
and she watched in disgust as an infected man shambled toward the fence with
his genitals swinging. He poked his fingers through the gaps in the chain-link.

When
she looked closer she saw that there was an opening at the back of their pen,
and this lead to a narrow passage which circled the complex. Stray infected
wandered through it and walked aimless patrols around the outskirts. With a
shock, Heather realised that at certain points there were gaps in the fence,
and the infected would be able to walk through it if they chose.

This
was their defence, then. There were no soldiers guarding the complex because
they didn’t need them. Why employ men and women to keep guard when you can have
a moat filled with the infected? People could get tired and lose concentration;
the infected never would.

She
heard groaning to her right. She spun round and saw a man, woman and a child
who walked towards her as an infected family. Fifty yards ahead an obese
infected squeezed through a gap in the fence, and stray wire scratched across
his uncovered belly and ripped his skin as he wedged his way through. Behind
him two more infected waited for their turn to pass. The groaning was louder
than a raging storm, and she knew that the infected had sensed her. Some would
have seen the tired woman as she passed through the gate. Others would have
smelled her flesh. Some of them tasted her in the air, the unmistakable
sensation of skin and blood that had not yet been infected and would be ripe
for a meal.

She
could have turned back, but she knew they would just follow her out of the
complex. There was nothing but wilderness for miles, and she didn’t have it in
her to lead a chase across the country with dozens, if not hundreds, of
infected pursuing. She had made it this far and turning back was not an option.

Heather
ran across the courtyard to the porta cabin that stood in the middle. It looked
like a shed that was once installed in her school playground after the art
department had flooded. Art class had been a sanctuary for Heather during the
heights of her bullying, because what she lacked in social skills she made up
for with creativity, and later, sport. When the department had flooded and the
porta cabin became the new art studio, her favourite teacher had left. The new
one, a stern woman who kept a notebook on the difficult children, had done away
with creative programs. To her, free-thinking was a dirty word. That was when Heather’s
love for art had died, and she hadn’t picked up a brush since.

She
tried the porta cabin door but it stubbornly held against her hand. She tried
pushing it forward and pulling it back, but it seemed that the cabin didn’t
want to give her sanctuary against the infected that were swarming toward her.
One of them, a young woman with a bush of ginger hair twice the size of her
head, was just fifteen feet away.

Heather
pointed the Heckler at the lock. It didn’t matter about the noise now. It
wasn’t as if she could attract anymore of the monsters than were already coming
for her. She looked down the sights of the gun, took a breath and pulled the
trigger. There was a bang, and she felt a pain in her shoulder as the gun
jolted her. Where the lock had once been was now a hole, and the smell of spent
fireworks hung in the air as she pushed open the door and stepped into the
cabin.

The
cabin was filled with nearly twenty thin people. They turned when they saw her.
Some slid off beds and got to their feet, bodies taut and trembling in
agitation. Heather wondered how many bullets were in the gun, and it took a few
seconds to realise that she wouldn’t need them. The people in front of her,
bodies stick thin and bones pressing into stretched skin, were not infected. Heather
took a step forward and a woman, old with a bent back and a silver necklace
dangling down to her breasts, backed away.

The
cabin was filled with rows of bunk beds that must have come straight from an
army barracks. A narrow space separated them in the middle, and at the end of
the cabin there was a doorway. The room beyond was dark, but Heather could make
out a row of toilets side by side with nothing covering them. Next to some of
the beds were wooden drawers, and the nearest one was open. She saw sheets of
paper that looked like newspaper clippings, as well as some indeterminate beige
blocks that could have been food of some kind.

She
grabbed a chair from under a desk at the side of the room. She dragged it to
the door and wedged it under the handle just in time for an infected to try to
push its way in. The door held firm under the rattling of the infected, but she
knew it wouldn’t stay that way.

Some
of the people had slunk away into the dark shadows of the room in the manner of
insects retreating from the light. A little girl stared at Heather from the top
bunk. Her face was clean but her clothes were covered in dirt. Heather took a
step forward. The old woman with the necklace looked at the gun in Heather’s
hand and shrieked. It was the kind of noise she’d expect from a rat trapped in
a corner.

“I’m
not going to hurt you.”

She
stepped forward, and the people scuttled back. There were less than twenty of
them in the room, but over thirty bunk-beds.  Heather put the gun in her pocket
and held her hands in the air. She tried her best to seem non-threatening.

“I’m
looking for two children,” she said.

She
girl on the bed perked her head up. The woman with the necklace blinked and
stuck a foot cautiously out of the shadows as though the light might burn her.

“They’re
not here,” she said, in a voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in days.
“Guards took them a few hours ago.”

Was
she already too late? She looked at the skinny people and realised what they
were. She stared carefully at their bodies and saw scratches on their arms and
bites on their necks. One man, with a square jaw and rough beard, had teeth
marks on his cheeks. They were all immune, she realised. They had been attacked
by the infected and survived the coma, and the Capita had celebrated by
bringing them here. It made her want to cry when she thought of Kim and Eric in
this same room, scared and wondering what would happen to them, waiting for the
soldiers to take them away.

“Are
they on the train?” said Heather.

“That’s
where they usually go,” said the woman.

Her
face was different, but her body reminded Heather of her grandmother. She had
once been a healthy woman but after slipping on ice and shattering a hip she
lost the confidence to leave her house.

I’ll
be happy when I can go out again,
she used to say
. Once I’m up to it.

She
and Heather both knew that day would never come. Her grandmother didn’t leave
the house in the last eleven years of her life. Her body grew thinner under a
lack of exercise and a diet of grilled fish and potatoes, but her left leg
swelled with water retention. Through years without use it started to look like
a hunk of beef.

Heather
felt tenderness for the woman in front of her. What was the point of it all?
She had survived through the outbreak and found herself in this new world, and
her reward for a life of hardship was being locked in a shed and left to waste
away.

“What
do you mean, they?” said Heather.

“The
ones who go to the farm.”

As
soon as she said the word a shockwave ran through the room, and some of the
immune moved farther back into the shadows until they were pressed against the
wall. The girl on the top bunk lifted the bed cover and buried herself in it,
leaving just enough of a gap for her head to poke out.

Heather
didn’t know what to say. She realised that these people wouldn’t care about her
problems, or her children for that matter. God knew how long they had been
here, wasting away, wondering when it would be their turn to board the train.

“How
the hell did they get a train working? And where do they keep it?”

“Nobody
knows,” answered a man.

He sat
on the edge of the bed and rolled paper between his fingers. It looked like a
cigarette, but when she looked closer Heather realised it was newspaper filled
with floor shavings.

“Ignore
him,” said the old lady. “It’s a steam powered train. Like they used to have.”

“Can
you take me to it?”

“If
you can get me out of here.”

The
door banged and rattled, and the chair holding it back shook under the force. Heather
wondered how many of them were outside. She realised that the infected hadn’t
approached the shed until now. She had led them here, and in doing so had put
these people in danger. They might have been immune to the virus, but that
didn’t mean the infected would ignore them.

“I
think I ruined our escape route,” said Heather.

“Don’t
worry. They usually drift away after a few minutes.”

She
realised that she was the only one who glanced toward the door every time it
shook. The others seemed more wary of Heather than the monsters outside. What
kind of a world was it where they had become more scared of people than the
infected?